New Advertising Campaign

Also, IBM recently
rolled out a new advertising campaign that speaks to its self-stated
performance edge in application server software and points to IBM's
leadership in database and data warehouse appliance capabilities as compared to
Oracle.
The IBM ads highlight:

IBM sets SPECJ
benchmark for WebSphere on Power Systems with 70-plus percent greater
performance than Oracle

The Netezza data warehousing appliance is up and
running in 24 hours versus 24 days or more for Oracle Exadata

DB2 has three times the performance per core as Oracle's
database in setting TPC-C and SAP
3D benchmarks.

Meanwhile, some market analysts said they have recently
had to question Oracle claims in the middleware space.
Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said, "It's
interesting in that Oracle appears to be attempting to deflate IBM's
numbers. In the last several market share reports from Gartner and IDC,
IBM has been the clear global leader in
middleware. And in part that's due to the fact that the IBM
mainframe has been such a dominant platform in the online transaction
processing space and Oracle seems to want to downplay those numbers."
Joe
Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, told eWEEK of Oracle's middleware
claims, "My issue is that I don't know where they are getting their data
from (they don't source it). And if they can't identify where the data is
coming from, that is tantamount to making up market share claims in my book."
Oracle
did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story posted.
IBM
claims that it is consistent performance that attracts many clients around the
globe to IBM such as QVC, CSN Stores,
Deutsche Postbank UK, Korea's
National Health Insurance Corp. (NHIC), Portland General Electric, Italian
banking group UniCredit and China's
Sichuan Seismic Bureau, among many others.
For example, QVC, one of the largest multimedia retailers
in the world, has selected IBM Netezza to
analyze user-generated content from its Web forums. In addition, CSN Stores,
the third largest online retailer of home goods in the United
States, chose IBM
Netezza to help its customers mine terabytes of data to monitor profitability
and customer satisfaction trends.
Deutsche Postbank UK is using a new IBM
Smart Analytics System to help improve the quality and accuracy of its business
reporting for risk monitoring, portfolio and collateral analysis. Portland
General Electric, Oregon's largest utility, has realized $18 million in annual
operational savings using IBM's WebSphere
software to help speed business processes such as the replacement of 850,000
energy meters with smart meters and billing processes.
NHIC consolidated its integration information system with
IBM's Tivoli
and WebSphere software, reducing the number of core processors needed to run
their operations. Italian banking group UniCredit reduced back office response
time from one day to minutes with an intelligent, paperless model using IBM's
virtualization software.
And China's
Sichuan Seismic Bureau automatically captures data recorded by seismic
monitoring stations, processing 100,000 messages accurately using WebSphere.

Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.